As Mourning Doves Persist

Some years ago a sister living in Northern California sent me a small slip  of laminated paper she'd retrieved from a box of Cracker Jacks - remember those? "A prize inside every box!" On the fortune cookie size slip  was a pictogram riddle  "Name this major city in the State of New Mexico",  a string of short syllables, and a blue and black pencil drawing of a turkey with a personified grin. On  the flip side was an annotation of the word it was after; t he designer was referring, of course, to Albuquerque - which really doesn't, but does, rhyme with turkey. This late, lazy Saturday night my husband and I are holed up in a hotel. He lies beside me lightly snoring. I've braved the pool's adjacent, lukewarm Jacuzzi in, you guessed it, the "Duke City" of Albuquerque, New Mexico. We needed a getaway and hit the highway headed due south for our select, mini-vacation main attraction, the city’s Bio Park hosting a lulling garden...

Bowerbird Chronicles III, Patricia Pearce You wait there in your Mary Janes, your black strap tap shoes and sassy cream colored capri pants. The bus has yet to come. Snow still caps the mountains all around you. Your smart silhouette assures me that in waiting, the ride will arrive.  Arms not crossed. A bag of books on your right shoulder. I imagine inside, short stories of fiesta by someone's daughter; feminism in four short lessons; the poems of Lorca with no translation.  Readied for debate. Your lipstick one shade of winter fade, spring's first tulip, electric crimson. Earring hoops gifted by a friend.  Behind you, the weathered parking lot of abandoned roasting tumblers, broken tail lights, red splinters on the blacktop. Before you, a slow snaking road of autos idling toward downtown's plaza where vendors spread small blankets topped with turquoise. The smell of caramel corn spilling from a metal cart. Obelisk in the center naming the dead. Your casual ...

I'm going to draft this post, for a change, without referring to a former journal entry or widget of a dream snippet and simply talk about what's been going on around me this week. For it's been a week of daughterhood and care taking my mother who generally needs very little oversight. Daughterhood, something that should roll off my fingers, yes, after being the oldest daughter for, dare I say it, 59 years. These days I'm more sister, mother, and wife. But, my mother had a surgery at the beginning of this week from which she will indeed need to recover, slowly. If you knew my mother you would grok that she is not an easy one to bring to a full stop. In fact, don't even try. She is the opposite of Queen for a Day; she is a workaholic through and through. Her mother used to say "She's just like her father; she just can't say no!".  And then there is always someone else in need that she's gathering time for - she's the girl scout in my ci...

Her hands run down the hourglass of my back. Tracing the flare where burrowed absentee tension coagulates. Washboard. Bath water, Blackboard burdened with layers of letters and calculations never entirely erased. We share answers to questions only asked by strangers who after four visits will never see one another again. She strikes a lighter, sucking oxygen from small glass cups that I cannot see, and attaches them to my back hovering above my bruised ribcage. Fascia ripples, letting down like a lithely inhabited village where our grandmothers still live, agile in their afterlives. Her black hair is pulled back from her face. I really only know her voice now from a warm table in a narrow room where, face down on my stomach, my neck relinquishes to the kneading. The name she gives to the tight spring under my right arm just at the webbing of shoulder blade and first rib is wholly new to me. Swans, her therapeutic lyric. I try to swallow the minute fountain th...

Mixed media by Erin Curier In our house there are books on books on every table and bedside stand. Books about the Roman Republic, silhouette of a bronze wolf. Tablets of poems crafted in long pipes like periscopes that you tell me you don't follow. A copy of your own novel holds a permanent corner of the round table - city of Buffalo in the rain. Blue stick figure notes dissect a yellow pad placeholder. An entire lecture series beacons we sit up and take notice. Anxious underfed p opulations balance on the head of a pin,  hitchhikers. I eat fettucini with green clams while reading midday, flip through saucy paragraphs, thumbing paper like garlic skin that sticks to skin. Lemon pepper punctuation. Monsters and friends spill from the orange cover and spine as I press down cautiously for fear of leaving clues on fresh snow and in the gutter of glue. Dedication like a large horse of a dog in woodblock poised in the foreground of a black forest. Secondhand Baldwin catches...

for Bernard We are misfits. We fit. Two halves of separately shattered plates. We've risen from central and north and stalk our disappointments on intelligent wheels. Today we are smart alecks, flirtatious at best and mean at the wall.  Twin siblings of different smoke stacks.  When our houses burned down we ate rubble just to claim a righteous plank chair in the small holocaust arena.  You once wore your clunky metal halo screwed into your neck and thick head, ducked for signs. I polished mine when no one was looking and nailed it to the front door like a year-round wreath warning anyone who could not pray to not get too close.  All these crooked years later your deep voice is still tempered with mischief. I cock my ear to listen in symphony.

After the collective reading, mixed bag, the visiting poet laureate speaks to hangers on, his right hand holds his cheek as if he needs perhaps, a cigarette. I wonder if it’s the Rocky Mountain altitude or remnant alcohol that stakes him, dreamy and distanced, even as he stands present as if imported, fragile. Wearing the anticipated blue-gray, he pours critique and future itinerary while around him the working hosts break down the folding table and chairs. Our tired stares transport us temporarily out to sea in this landlocked state. Still, I wish that I was standing on a remarkable table elsewhere, reading bawdy song, advocating we set fire to the menus, all too familiar now. May the river of collective angst and honor take to slicing rich portabella mushrooms, grill steak, and listen instead to our wise children populating contemplative classrooms in another city, making tiny documentaries of what they see on the horizon in front of them.